


Written Between The Lines

by gamerfic



Series: Reconstruction [1]
Category: Banlieue 13 (Movies)
Genre: Action, M/M, POV Outsider, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-19
Updated: 2010-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-13 21:11:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamerfic/pseuds/gamerfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the buildings fell, the real work began.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Written Between The Lines

**Author's Note:**

  * For [etben](https://archiveofourown.org/users/etben/gifts).



Tao perched on a second-story balcony, waiting.  She peered through her binoculars at the large, grimy windows of the graffiti-scarred building on the other side of the street.  It was fortunate that some structures like this one had been far enough to the edges of the _banlieue_ to stay standing when Damien and Leïto had told the President to blow everything else sky-high; staking out a windowless institutional monolith like the apartment buildings that had been at the center of the blasts would have been much more difficult.  _And who knows_ , she thought, _maybe once we finish rebuilding, this classy old architecture will make Banlieue 13 the next trendy address for rich Parisian assholes._ A sardonic grin quirked at the corners of her mouth at the thought.  _Nah.  People don't change that much._

Through the windows, Tao saw Sacha's gang greet a trio of buyers proudly displaying a briefcase full of cash and spread paper-wrapped packages of heroin across a scarred wooden table.  Rumor had it that this place was a well-known meeting spot for dealers and their clients, and the fact that the supposedly public building had been virtually deserted before the deal began seemed to confirm it.  The only other person Tao could see, an elderly woman behind a desk, had pointedly turned away and acted busy as soon as Sacha had walked in.  Tao had always known that the demolition was only the beginning of the real work of rebuilding B13, but it still discouraged her to see dealers behaving like they owned the whole _banlieue_ after everything that had happened and everything she'd done.

But before she could follow that thought any further, Leïto dropped onto the table from somewhere in the rafters.  The window that separated Tao from the chaos that ensued blocked out the sound of the fight, but she'd cracked skulls alongside Leïto often enough over the past year to be able to imagine the smack of his fists and feet making contact with a dealer's torso, the hard snap of the briefcase against a buyer's face when Leïto grabbed it and swung it at him, the soft thud of Leïto's feet on the carpet as he took off with the briefcase tucked under one arm.

Leïto was fast, but his opponents recovered quickly from their initial surprise and came at him from all directions.  Tao briefly considered climbing down to help him out - until the old woman vaulted over the desk, dropped one of the attackers with a high kick to the back of the head, and tackled another to the ground.  Tao laughed as a wrestling match broke out, thinking, _I know those moves.  What is it with Damien and stupid dress-up games anyway?_

Back at the table, Sacha gathered the scattered packages of heroin and crammed them into a backpack as his people dispersed. Leïto must have noticed, because he quickly removed himself from the fight, trusting Damien to take care of the thugs.  Sacha saw Leïto coming, shrugged the backpack onto his shoulders, and grabbed a nearby railing to pull himself onto the walkway that ran along the building's far wall.

Leïto's eyes flickered toward a spiral staircase that led up to the walkway.  With a few explosive movements he climbed the outside of the staircase and began to close the distance to Sacha.  Sacha threw step-stools and tipped over bookshelves in his wake, trying to slow Leïto down as he searched for an exit that Tao could not see.  She lowered the binoculars.  Wherever Leïto and Sacha were going, it wasn't her job to follow.

In the meantime, three of Sacha's people had gathered up the packages that Sacha had missed and escaped into the street, not far from the balcony.  This was where Tao came in.  She slipped her headphones into her ears, cued up some angry hip-hop on her iPod, and unbound her braid from where it lay coiled at the back of her neck.  The three men didn't see her until she had already landed in a crouch behind them.  By then it was already too late.

The first man had only enough time to cry out when Tao's foot struck the outside of his knee.  He fell, clutching at the joint, and a second swift kick to the temple silenced him.  She threw an uppercut at the jaw of the second as he turned to see what had happened, putting her momentum behind the strike as she rose up, but the first man's cry had warned him and he sidestepped the blow.  She ducked under his clumsy return punch and faked him out by winding up for another strike to the face that never came.  Instead, she slammed her knee into his stomach while he was looking the other way.  His breath _whoosh_ ed out of him and she brought her knee upward to bash his nose as he instinctively bent over.  He hit the pavement hard.

The last man seized Tao from behind.  She stomped down hard on his foot, then threw her head back to connect with his face.  Stars exploded in front of her vision as the back of her skull made teeth-jarring contact with his cheekbone.  The headbutt startled him into loosening his grip, and Tao slipped out while she had the chance.  The man took a few steps back, shaking his head to clear it, and pulled a switchblade out of his jacket.

That was all the permission Tao needed.  With a smooth roll of her neck and shoulders, she whipped the end of her braid across the third man's face. The blades that she had wrapped up in her hair sliced open his forehead.  He was blinded and staggering and it would have been the work of a moment to kill him where he stood - hell, she _wanted_ to kill him, to burn off a little more pent-up aggression toward these bastards who couldn't stop wrecking her neighborhood - but she decided she'd rather restrain herself than face Leïto and Damien's disapproval.  Instead, she forced all three men to their knees and zip-tied their wrists and ankles - another one of Damien's favorite law-abiding strategies.

Farther down the street, Tao heard a commotion loud enough to overpower the music still blaring in her ears. Tao looked up from gathering the packages of heroin to see Damien slide through the open window of a car idling nearby ( _I see he still doesn't like using doors,_ she thought), flash his badge, and order the driver out.  He was still wearing the shapeless flowered dress and sensible woman's shoes that had been his disguise, though his grey wig had slid to one side to expose most of his shaved head.  He pulled up alongside Tao in a plume of exhaust and squealing tires.  "Leïto's chasing Sacha.  Get in."

Tao climbed into the passenger seat.  "Nice disguise," she said as Damien peeled out.

"It did the job," he said, either ignoring the sarcasm in her tone or oblivious to it.

"Did you have to pretend to be a little old lady to get inside, or was that part just for fun?"

"It gives you more freedom if people assume you’re not a threat."

"So, for fun, then?"

"Shut up."

A few blocks down the road, Damien pointed at the roof of an apartment building.  Tao looked up and saw Sacha launch himself across the gap between two tenements and land with a stumble.  Leïto pursued him with a leap that had more in common with floating than jumping.  He hit the roof in a crouch and rolled with the momentum.

Sacha had reached the end of the block and, faced with nowhere to jump to, was climbing down a fire escape with Leïto close behind.  Damien put the car in park without taking his eyes off Leïto.  He seemed to have forgotten Tao's presence entirely as he pulled off his dress and wig to reveal loose black athletic clothing beneath.  Then he was sliding through the open window again and running toward Leïto, his fists already clenching in anticipation of the fight, ready to be there when Leïto hit the ground.

* * *

A few hours later, Damien's cop friends had come and gone, taking the money and the drugs and a battered Sacha and his zip-tied thugs away with them in the back of a few police cruisers.  Tao now sat on top of a table in a quiet corner of the building they'd just retaken with her laptop open in front of her.  Damien had looked the other way when Tao copied the data from a USB stick they'd found in Sacha’s pocket; he wasn't such an upright citizen that he'd turn down a peek at the names of Sacha's buyers, suppliers, and fellow dealers sooner than the official investigation got around to it.  She'd switched her iPod over to some downbeat trance and was making progress on cracking the encryption when she heard voices nearby.  Adrenaline spiked in her veins - had Sacha's friends dropped by for a little payback? - but when she took out one ear bud she recognized Leïto's voice.

"They trashed the carpet but we can tear it up.  This furniture's no good either, but maybe the reward money from the tip-off about Sacha can pay to replace it.  Non-fiction here, fiction on the other side.  Reference books and reading chairs up along the walkway.  Children's section in the other room.  That’s how it used to be before the dealers took over, anyway."  Tao found herself smiling - Leïto's enthusiasm was contagious even when he was out of her sight.

Damien sounded as surprised as Tao felt.  "Since when do you get so excited over libraries anyway?

"What, you think in the _banlieue_ we don’t know how to read?"

"Hey, man, no need to get so defensive."

"I'm not defensive.  I'm fucking with you."

"Then you should learn to tell better jokes, asshole."  The growing smiles in their voices mirrored her own.  There was a pause before Damien spoke again.  "I didn't know it mattered so much to you."

"It does."  Leïto's tone was suddenly solemn.  "I grew up here.  I remember what it was like.  You can't learn shit when every place that could teach you is overrun with dealers.  It just makes you think the way to survive is to be like them.  You can take down all the criminals you want, but if you don't build something better than what they're selling, kids just grow up to be them."

"So that's what you want to do now?  Build something better?  And settle down in a nice little house and get old and senile together?"

"Only if you do the cooking."  Tao wasn’t sure if they were joking now.

"You're gonna make one hell of a weird librarian," Damien said.

"Me?  A librarian?  No way," said Leïto.  "I haven't read a book in years."

"Seriously?"

"I dropped out, remember?  After that, Lola and Taha's gang kept me kind of busy."

Damien paused, then said, "Come with me."  Tao heard their footsteps crossing the stained carpet to the other side of the library.  She considered following, knowing it was more than a little creepy to have listened in for this long already - but she was still a hacker at heart, and no hacker ever got anywhere interesting by ignoring their innate sense of inappropriate curiosity. She paused her music, silently closed her laptop's cover, and crept after them.

Soon Tao caught a glimpse of Leïto's spiky black hair through a shelf mostly devoid of books.  She stopped there, crouching low to the ground on the other side of the aisle.  Leïto's smile had become bemused as he watched Damien stand on tiptoe and scan the few volumes that hadn't been pawned off for drug money or rendered illegible through age and lack of care.  At last he picked out one battered paperback, its yellowing cover dog-eared and its spine deeply creased, and handed it to Leïto.  "Here. A gift."

"You steal gifts for me now?  Some cop you are."

"It's a _library_ , dumbass.  They lend the fucking books out for free.  Just consider yourself the first patron at its grand re-opening."

Leïto glanced at the cover, took a step closer to Damien.  "Les Trois Mousquetaires?"

"Alexandre Dumas, yeah.  It's a classic for a reason."

"I know."

"So, what, you checked it out when you used to come here, before you gave up books to fight crime and jump off tall buildings?"

"No, but I'm not completely stupid.  I know about the characters.  Some of the plot.  _Tous pour un, un pour tous._ All that stuff."

"Good.  Then you know why I picked this one out of all the books in here."

Leïto had moved in even closer by now, his face just centimeters from Damien's.  Yet Damien stayed still, not asserting control the way he usually did when someone got into his personal space.  When Leïto spoke, his voice was low and husky, barely audible from where Tao still crouched.  "I told you, I'm just a kid from the _banlieue_.  You better spell it out or I might not get the picture."

Damien reached out and rested a hand on Leïto's shoulder, tracing his fingers across tattooed skin.  "Loyalty.  No matter what. Is that clear enough for you?  Or do I have to make it clearer?"

Tao didn't dare to wait for Leïto's response.  She turned away and crept back to her table in the corner.  It wasn't so much that her curiosity had failed her as that her manners had finally won.  She'd been reading between the lines of Damien and Leïto's story for a long time now, trying to figure out if the looks they gave each other and the wrestling matches they insisted were just meant to keep each other in practice could really be explained by only friendship.  _When you can't tell what a story is implying,_ she thought, _all you have to go on is what you know was written.  And it's written plain as day that these two are good men, and they're good for each other.  Everything else is their business, not mine._

Tao put her headphones back on and opened her laptop again.  The decryption program's progress bar was still making its slow way across the screen, bringing her closer to the next step toward change with each second that went by.  Her fingers flew across the keyboard, trying to tease out the data a little faster.  She'd let Damien and Leïto have their moment, in whatever form it took.  _And then, back to the streets - all for one, and one for all.  However you take that to mean._   She pushed "play" on her iPod and let the music that filled her ears carry her away, into the lines of code that scrolled across the screen.  _When the buildings came down, the real work began.  And it's time for us to change the ending to this story._

**Author's Note:**

> After writing a few stories in this fandom, mainly as Yuletide gifts, I realized that they could all be seen as part of the same continuity. Because I want to keep telling stories about these characters' post-canon lives, I've added them to a series after the fact. However, each story can also be enjoyed in isolation from the others if that's how you prefer to read them.


End file.
